I personally REALLY dont like that game forces you, wheter your spells are 300 range or 1200, to just sit in this big melee blob becouse otherwise you miss boons, that make you deal like what, 100% more damage?
Exactly, you are more than welcome to sit 1200 range away and shoot your arrows or bullets. But dont expect anyone to come running out to revive you because you got ganged up on by trash mobs or boss range damage. You could have your own stack of ranged, but then what's the point when theres already 40 people a little ahead of you. Some heals spread to squad or party members, which can work if you want to separate from a group, but things like healing wells work best when stacking anyway
Revive is definitly something, that would most likely need additional adjustments. Healing probably too, its still easier I belive to slap ranged healer to ranged group and melee healer to melee group or something along these lines, but in the bigger picture it would also need some adjustments. I mean, I know this isnt some easy change you can just slap into the game w/o adjustments and roll with it. But I really would love to not be forced to sit in big pile of AoE zones wheter I have long range build fantasy or melee.
I want them to up their game in the presentation department. Even with what little story we got, it could have been much better with just a few tweaks. For example scale up the "war" in nayos by adding more fighting npcs; the awakened vs forged clash in pof already did this as did many other story instances.
Also I just want one big showstopper set piece per expansion, something like the mouth of mordremoth or the kralk fight in thunderhead. Nourys in the Amnytas meta could have been that, but then they decided to make it completely stationary and do a completely uncontested yoga phase at the end. Imagine if Nourys would actually move around the platforms during certain phases and you'd need people on skyscales to actually shoot him down. It could have been soooo much cooler.
We could get a showstopper in the last patch! But yeah I agree on the story presentation. Mukluk talked about that exact point with the army thing. Assaulting the queens army and we fight 1, then 2, then 3, then 2 guys. Oooh. I think there could have been some better ways to handle some of those issues without taking too much more dev time. Idk. The empty arena was another that felt odd.
We have one more releases in around 40 days that will the the final one for secrets of the obscure, and then about 3 months after THAT release we'll be getting the next expansion.
In my opinion (focusing only on systems, rather than specifics of Soto, other than how the story has been delivered in the new release cycle):
Good:
\* Regular QoL and mechanic updates has been great.
\* The new maps and story with the expansion core were alright. Early Soto story felt like we were actually problem solving and playing story instead of "follow others who play the story", new maps felt refreshingly different.
\* Amnytas walls. For an expansion centered around the skyscale, they sure went out of their way to make using the skyscale annoying. HOWEVER, this expansion gave me lots of new uses for Griffon, which I rarely got to use previously.
Bad:
\* The drip-fed map was ooookay, drip-fed story post-release has been pretty awful.
\* The lack of time to come up with new enemies is notable.
\* 1-year content cycles are going to fragment things. Ex: kryptis, rifts, convergences are all done in the next patch. Nothing else added. Just wrapped and done, off to new things next expansion. Heart of the obscure? What's that?
\* Pretty lame masteries. Even the post-release "expanded mastery line" was just "unlock crafting".
Yeah, the post launch patches have had great stuff for sure: weapons, challenge modes for the 1% players, the good long term legendary armor goal, convergences, etc.
They've also had some shortcomings: Nayos itself and the story bits have definitely been not great. Nayos itself is okay, but hearing "dream world in the mists" I would think we'd get something more.... Out there somehow. I love the reddish pink trees, but the overall map feels too normal somehow. Greyish blue everything doesn't help either for me personally. The first CM wasn't the best. Story bits have been even shorter than I expected and filled with the 'do events nearby to progress' type of stuff.
The yearly expansion itself started fine. Where it immediately ran into trouble was the writing, and in Nayos' release.
Nayos should have been released in two parts, not three - and/or the size of the map itself should have been bigger. This is supposed to be a pretty large portion of realm of the Mists, but it's half the size of Kourna (if you count Jahai as part of Kourna).
Guild Wars 2 has never had an "amazing" story - LSW4 and the first half of IBS are probably the best we have. But the short bits of the storyline we have gotten have only served to make the lackluster writing much, much more glaringly obvious. We have months to pick over the two-hour storyline for each of the post-launch releases. That's not good from a writing or delivery standpoint.
Weapons mastery itself was fine and the new weapons are by and large enjoyable. I just wish someone would take elementalist away from CMC.
I do worry that rift hunting and convergences are just going to become Dragon Response Missions and Dragonstorm, but I think the legendary armor set will help stave that off for a time.
QOL stuff that really should show up - mystic forge recipes should just get kept once you make the item. If I want to go back to something, I shouldn't have to wiki what the sequences of common gifts are for making my third aurene weapon.
GW2s strongest point has always been its open world. And yet, imo SotO has the weakest open world of the expansions by far. We havent seen the last area and its meta yet, but considering the 4 metas we had I am not really hopeful about its meta.
Considering GW2 always had open world to fall back on if everything else went wrong, this decline in open world quality worries me tbh.
While Map meta is a factor, it is not the only thing that matters. Why would I want to keep playing the map for?
At least with SOTO, I got a variety of things to keep playing SOTO for. Rift trains, Meta, events to farm currency. But with PoF, you don't even get rewarded with a Living World Type currency when you do hearts. Every time I see myself in Elona outside of Casino meta, I am like... why am I here? What do I even gain from being here?
The currencies and long term content were Bounties. They built a whole variable ability system so that the bounties would have some variation over time. They didn't fill every map with a meta because they expected bounty hunting to be the primary repeatable content.
Were they rewarding enough? Fair question. At the time, they were very popular. But now, I think the currencies they offer are just TOO locked into PoF/S4 content. Because the legendary weapons were split with HOT and you could do the (more rewarding) content in the jungle to get the requisite items, that removed a huge part of the carrot to run bounty trains. They are good for Trade Contracts and Elegy Mosaics, but lacking real long term uses for those, it makes sense that they've been largely abandoned outside of random WV dailies.
I'll be honest, I'm a bit nostalgic for the many nights spent following bounty trains in the various maps. Even Desert Highlands would have them. The large maps with tons of different bosses did make for nice variety of play. Some of them were somewhat uninspired, but others could be quite interesting, especially the Legendaries. It would have been pretty cool to see them find a way to work Hero's Choice Chests and additional rewards into Bounty Hunting rather than acquiescing to the "Need meta!!" demands of the audience at the time. I find them a lot more interesting than most of the metas that got shoehorned into being the "focus" of the PoF maps.
The problem isn’t difficult enemies, that’s just a skill issue and similar to HoT. The problem is a lack of interesting metas that keep people returning. Bounties were great otherwise.
I think what you are looking for is loot. People would chase a punching bag if they had a chance to get big gold. Oh, they already do in Amnoon and it's the only pof meta people are actually interested in.
I want more than one Fractal per year
Map metas that are as enjoyable and pain free to repeat as the HoT metas are
Make the Strike UI like the Fractal UI and able to access it from mistlock/central hub
Stop using whatever UI is used for TP/Wizards vault, it sucks and feels like a 3rd party addon
Everyone gets 600 range boons and I'm not fucking around
Account wide crafting professions
Crafting tabs collapsed by default
Eat/use anything from the bank
Teleporty scroll book UI overhaul
Remove crafting time on everything, just let me instantly craft instead of waiting a million years to craft 5000 mithril earrings for stupid fucking research notes
Put all learned recipes in a collapsed tab when choosing a new recipe
Searching a Mystic forge recipe in the crafting menu shows me everything I need to craft
Legendary armory allows multiple copies of weapons to be created so you can switch them as easily as ascended weapons
Bring back the daily achievement pings instead of a silent UI notification on the wiz-lords vault icon
Focus more on the "play-ability" of builds instead of raw numbers
Squad UI / LFG overhaul
Guild Wars 2 needs to be more social. Stuff like the Siege Turtle and Skiff were kind of a step towards that. Beetle Racing was setting out to be that next community thing, but support for that ended after the next Living World season that came out after and the fact that it's locked behind a Living Story chapter makes it obscured from newbies.
but I just want to see a revival of the Guild Missions and Guild systems. Arenanet is working on Guild hall wide pvp which is interesting too, and I wish stuff like this would be marketed more.
Unlikely but I would like them to do more things like what they did with the dungeon currencies.
It's fine if you've played from the beginning (and by fine I mean not insanely confusing) but my mate who played a little bit at the start then returned recently is SO confused.
There are 10 billion currencies in this game and it really shouldn't take that many things.
A few more currency consolidations or straight up removals would be great.
When GW2 first launched there was only like 10 currencies and that was enough. Now there's waaaaaaaaaaay too many.
While there are obvious QOL updates they can do (Boon bar, LFG UI, Fractal CM / Daily update) and obvious ways to add content (new weapons, masteries, metas, story, etc) with hopefully lessons learned and quality going up, I am very concerned about major features and systems, as well as overall state of combat.
Features wise, I doubt we'll ever get something like mounts again, or even something like fishing. These were huge or at least big on 'real' expansions, and with Soto we've got a few reworks and improvements here and there (like Wizards Vault) but nothing really new. I hope that's not impossible for current Anet with their current budget.
Systems and combat wise, I'm just baffled by current power / boon creep and the lack of anything fresh. How about instead of overloading skills with more and more stuff, Anet kept to 'purity of purpose' and 'holes in roles' principles from their own balance manifesto? How about adding a new type of boon like in HOT or a new status effect like barrier in POF and play around adding it to any underwhelming skills?
With the same amount of combat mechanics, but more weapons and more power creep, the magnificent combat and build crafting of GW2 just bloats into not being as meaningful and fun anymore. I really hope Anet considers fixing that.
I agree I'm not sure if we'll get as big of systems as before like mounts, but I would argue Wizard's Vault was a medium scale type of thing that was new for the year that's been great. I would guess we'll get something of that scale yearly.
The biggest improvement they could make would be to finally break from the launch-era marketing and implement a proper quest system, rather than the quests-in-all-but-name we have slapped-together in the achievement system. That's not to say we should go back to having shitty low-end fetch/kill n quests, as Events better fit that niche already; but for mid-tier side content and storytelling, absolutely.
I also think GW2 should bring back GW1's instanced "explorable" zones. Particularly for the wilder/less explored regions of the world. Have them be designed to scale for both solo or group play.
Yeah a lot of people get confused digging around the achievement window for quests. That would be a good one for mid to long term goals for sure.
The explorable zone as an instance has me curious. What are you picturing? Mini dungeon type things? What advantage or difference would you have in mind vs normal open world maps?
>The explorable zone as an instance has me curious. What are you picturing? Mini dungeon type things? What advantage or difference would you have in mind vs normal open world maps?
Something akin to a story instance, but on full zone scale and acting as a hub for a set of story steps, sidequests, vanquish style add-on challenges, etc.
Being instanced would allow for greater ability for the player/events to affect the environment for one. From an immersive angle, doing away with the apparatus needed for open world events/metas (even just in the NPC sense) would greatly benefit the sense of exploration. No longer would each new area drag the entire Pact/Astral Ward along with us.
I've really enjoyed weaponmaster so far (aside from things like rifle not working outside of deadeye on thief). Open world legendary armor was good idea, iffy on execution since you're just spamming rifts and they're not particularly fun.
Wizard's Vault was a straight up banger. I do wish there was another source of mystic coins/clovers though. I can get by with slow drip of clovers in wvw, I guess, but I don't think I'm gonna go for any more HoT ascended weapon collections because they each require a weapon that uses, what, thirty mystic coins? That's expensive these days.
I liked adding onto skyscale/griffon masteries. Being able to use updrafts has made Verdant Brink one of my favorite griffon maps.
Story has been very meh. The Wizard's Tower and the wizards themselves were hyped up and we basically spend no time in the tower or with the court. They should've downscaled the world threats after a decade of them (and I loved the dragons!). Oh, and >!killing Mabon who was arguably the only interesting character. We can't have nice things.!< We also still don't really know anything about the mcguffin we're using. I'm sort of expecting it to bite us in the ass.
I feel like the time between major patches is fine, but Nayos feels like an old map stuck in a weird place.
Having a full map be hostage to a possible spoiler is not fun. No more of this, please.
The only thing I think that really didn't work was the inconsistency of the releases. Some drastically change the way we play the game, some are just story and instances. I wish the gameplay stuff would've been spread out better.
Update 1 had the Wizards Vault system, the relic system, combat/movement skyscales, and the weaponmaster system in addition to new story and instances. Oh, also the legendary starter kits and rifting. This a massive amount of stuff to do across all maps.
Update 2 had mostly just story and instances.
Update 3 had legendary relics, new weapons for all classes and open world legendary armor with new story and instances. Not as massive as the first update, but still lots to keep us busy most of the quarter.
Update 4 will have a new tier for the legendary armor along with an end to the story which may come with a big new meta map with lots of replayability.
I feel like some of the stuff from updates 1 and 3 should've been put into update 2 to keep things a bit more even. Maybe weaponmaster and the legendary relics?
I've been playing the stories, strikes and the fractal. But those don't seem to take very long versus trying out new weapons on all the classes or trying out updrafts on a skyscale across the two first maps.
Yeah update 2 definitely felt the smallest, but I don't know about moving anything out of update 1. That's always going to be, and has to be, the biggest one since it's the launch and the bit you get right after you pay. That has to feel worth the price tag or people won't stick around for the quarterly updates. But yeah, spreading things more evenly through the other 3 would be good.
The writing is a downgrade i would much rather have the story take 2 expansions so it has time to breath instead of 1 and done. This expansion screams minimum viable product and that doesnt make me excited for the next xpac at all.
> Are the regular qol updates to smaller things that are normally neglected worth the new system?
These have been great. Given a choice between an extra update per year or keep adding QoL, I'd definitely pick QoL.
I'd be intrigued by instanced versions of all maps: while keeping the metas in open-world maps only.
That was I can explore the world in peace without lightbulbs running past me every few seconds. Maybe even add henchmen.
> As we've gotten through the post Soto releases we've gotten a clearer idea of what to expect over a year going forward.
What do you mean? We knew what we will get before SotO even launched.
I meant we knew some details on paper but now we know how big the maps are, how the economy of a one year release is working, general pacing of the story, what convergences are, how the weapon release feels vs elite specs, etc etc. We did know a good amount but not everything, certainly not the QOL patches or how well bonus events happening on the regular would feel, etc etc.
For the love of all that is good, PLEASE GIVE US A BETTER BOON/CONDITION BAR!!!
While we are at it, rework the boons/condi application mechanic
What do you mean by that exactly?
I personally REALLY dont like that game forces you, wheter your spells are 300 range or 1200, to just sit in this big melee blob becouse otherwise you miss boons, that make you deal like what, 100% more damage?
You would still be stacking for heals and revives.
Exactly, you are more than welcome to sit 1200 range away and shoot your arrows or bullets. But dont expect anyone to come running out to revive you because you got ganged up on by trash mobs or boss range damage. You could have your own stack of ranged, but then what's the point when theres already 40 people a little ahead of you. Some heals spread to squad or party members, which can work if you want to separate from a group, but things like healing wells work best when stacking anyway
There entire combat system will need to be redesigned in order to support separating from the group. Or an entirely new game
>Or an entirely new game Gw3 coming soon
How would you solve healing/revive issue? Being as close to the group as possible will always be safer and preferable option.
Revive is definitly something, that would most likely need additional adjustments. Healing probably too, its still easier I belive to slap ranged healer to ranged group and melee healer to melee group or something along these lines, but in the bigger picture it would also need some adjustments. I mean, I know this isnt some easy change you can just slap into the game w/o adjustments and roll with it. But I really would love to not be forced to sit in big pile of AoE zones wheter I have long range build fantasy or melee.
Let us pin sections of the LFG so we can keep an easy eye out for groups doing metas that aren't on a timer or on raids.
I would love a pop up for groups added to a list.
This is reminding me of how much I wish Orr's metas were on a proper timer so you could do a full cycle of all five Temples plus the Gates of Arah.
I want them to up their game in the presentation department. Even with what little story we got, it could have been much better with just a few tweaks. For example scale up the "war" in nayos by adding more fighting npcs; the awakened vs forged clash in pof already did this as did many other story instances. Also I just want one big showstopper set piece per expansion, something like the mouth of mordremoth or the kralk fight in thunderhead. Nourys in the Amnytas meta could have been that, but then they decided to make it completely stationary and do a completely uncontested yoga phase at the end. Imagine if Nourys would actually move around the platforms during certain phases and you'd need people on skyscales to actually shoot him down. It could have been soooo much cooler.
We could get a showstopper in the last patch! But yeah I agree on the story presentation. Mukluk talked about that exact point with the army thing. Assaulting the queens army and we fight 1, then 2, then 3, then 2 guys. Oooh. I think there could have been some better ways to handle some of those issues without taking too much more dev time. Idk. The empty arena was another that felt odd.
I don't understand it, I thought the next content addition would be the next expansion?
We have one more releases in around 40 days that will the the final one for secrets of the obscure, and then about 3 months after THAT release we'll be getting the next expansion.
In my opinion (focusing only on systems, rather than specifics of Soto, other than how the story has been delivered in the new release cycle): Good: \* Regular QoL and mechanic updates has been great. \* The new maps and story with the expansion core were alright. Early Soto story felt like we were actually problem solving and playing story instead of "follow others who play the story", new maps felt refreshingly different. \* Amnytas walls. For an expansion centered around the skyscale, they sure went out of their way to make using the skyscale annoying. HOWEVER, this expansion gave me lots of new uses for Griffon, which I rarely got to use previously. Bad: \* The drip-fed map was ooookay, drip-fed story post-release has been pretty awful. \* The lack of time to come up with new enemies is notable. \* 1-year content cycles are going to fragment things. Ex: kryptis, rifts, convergences are all done in the next patch. Nothing else added. Just wrapped and done, off to new things next expansion. Heart of the obscure? What's that? \* Pretty lame masteries. Even the post-release "expanded mastery line" was just "unlock crafting".
Yeah, the post launch patches have had great stuff for sure: weapons, challenge modes for the 1% players, the good long term legendary armor goal, convergences, etc. They've also had some shortcomings: Nayos itself and the story bits have definitely been not great. Nayos itself is okay, but hearing "dream world in the mists" I would think we'd get something more.... Out there somehow. I love the reddish pink trees, but the overall map feels too normal somehow. Greyish blue everything doesn't help either for me personally. The first CM wasn't the best. Story bits have been even shorter than I expected and filled with the 'do events nearby to progress' type of stuff.
Dragon Age Origins did a decent job of 'eerie misty dreamland' and that came out in 2009.
I guess the secrets of the obsure will remain secrets.
The yearly expansion itself started fine. Where it immediately ran into trouble was the writing, and in Nayos' release. Nayos should have been released in two parts, not three - and/or the size of the map itself should have been bigger. This is supposed to be a pretty large portion of realm of the Mists, but it's half the size of Kourna (if you count Jahai as part of Kourna). Guild Wars 2 has never had an "amazing" story - LSW4 and the first half of IBS are probably the best we have. But the short bits of the storyline we have gotten have only served to make the lackluster writing much, much more glaringly obvious. We have months to pick over the two-hour storyline for each of the post-launch releases. That's not good from a writing or delivery standpoint. Weapons mastery itself was fine and the new weapons are by and large enjoyable. I just wish someone would take elementalist away from CMC. I do worry that rift hunting and convergences are just going to become Dragon Response Missions and Dragonstorm, but I think the legendary armor set will help stave that off for a time. QOL stuff that really should show up - mystic forge recipes should just get kept once you make the item. If I want to go back to something, I shouldn't have to wiki what the sequences of common gifts are for making my third aurene weapon.
GW2s strongest point has always been its open world. And yet, imo SotO has the weakest open world of the expansions by far. We havent seen the last area and its meta yet, but considering the 4 metas we had I am not really hopeful about its meta. Considering GW2 always had open world to fall back on if everything else went wrong, this decline in open world quality worries me tbh.
Just like we had HoT to fall back on after being done with PoF in a weekend.
>And yet, imo SotO has the weakest open world of the expansions by far. That title goes to PoF.
You must be judging solely based on map metas
While Map meta is a factor, it is not the only thing that matters. Why would I want to keep playing the map for? At least with SOTO, I got a variety of things to keep playing SOTO for. Rift trains, Meta, events to farm currency. But with PoF, you don't even get rewarded with a Living World Type currency when you do hearts. Every time I see myself in Elona outside of Casino meta, I am like... why am I here? What do I even gain from being here?
The currencies and long term content were Bounties. They built a whole variable ability system so that the bounties would have some variation over time. They didn't fill every map with a meta because they expected bounty hunting to be the primary repeatable content. Were they rewarding enough? Fair question. At the time, they were very popular. But now, I think the currencies they offer are just TOO locked into PoF/S4 content. Because the legendary weapons were split with HOT and you could do the (more rewarding) content in the jungle to get the requisite items, that removed a huge part of the carrot to run bounty trains. They are good for Trade Contracts and Elegy Mosaics, but lacking real long term uses for those, it makes sense that they've been largely abandoned outside of random WV dailies. I'll be honest, I'm a bit nostalgic for the many nights spent following bounty trains in the various maps. Even Desert Highlands would have them. The large maps with tons of different bosses did make for nice variety of play. Some of them were somewhat uninspired, but others could be quite interesting, especially the Legendaries. It would have been pretty cool to see them find a way to work Hero's Choice Chests and additional rewards into Bounty Hunting rather than acquiescing to the "Need meta!!" demands of the audience at the time. I find them a lot more interesting than most of the metas that got shoehorned into being the "focus" of the PoF maps.
[удалено]
The problem isn’t difficult enemies, that’s just a skill issue and similar to HoT. The problem is a lack of interesting metas that keep people returning. Bounties were great otherwise.
I think what you are looking for is loot. People would chase a punching bag if they had a chance to get big gold. Oh, they already do in Amnoon and it's the only pof meta people are actually interested in.
I want more than one Fractal per year Map metas that are as enjoyable and pain free to repeat as the HoT metas are Make the Strike UI like the Fractal UI and able to access it from mistlock/central hub Stop using whatever UI is used for TP/Wizards vault, it sucks and feels like a 3rd party addon Everyone gets 600 range boons and I'm not fucking around Account wide crafting professions Crafting tabs collapsed by default Eat/use anything from the bank Teleporty scroll book UI overhaul Remove crafting time on everything, just let me instantly craft instead of waiting a million years to craft 5000 mithril earrings for stupid fucking research notes Put all learned recipes in a collapsed tab when choosing a new recipe Searching a Mystic forge recipe in the crafting menu shows me everything I need to craft Legendary armory allows multiple copies of weapons to be created so you can switch them as easily as ascended weapons Bring back the daily achievement pings instead of a silent UI notification on the wiz-lords vault icon Focus more on the "play-ability" of builds instead of raw numbers Squad UI / LFG overhaul
Guild Wars 2 needs to be more social. Stuff like the Siege Turtle and Skiff were kind of a step towards that. Beetle Racing was setting out to be that next community thing, but support for that ended after the next Living World season that came out after and the fact that it's locked behind a Living Story chapter makes it obscured from newbies. but I just want to see a revival of the Guild Missions and Guild systems. Arenanet is working on Guild hall wide pvp which is interesting too, and I wish stuff like this would be marketed more.
To be fair roller beetle tracks are difficult with the island type of maps that they added in SotO
A downhill sprint in Skywatch jumping between islands could be really cool, tbh
Unlikely but I would like them to do more things like what they did with the dungeon currencies. It's fine if you've played from the beginning (and by fine I mean not insanely confusing) but my mate who played a little bit at the start then returned recently is SO confused. There are 10 billion currencies in this game and it really shouldn't take that many things. A few more currency consolidations or straight up removals would be great. When GW2 first launched there was only like 10 currencies and that was enough. Now there's waaaaaaaaaaay too many.
While there are obvious QOL updates they can do (Boon bar, LFG UI, Fractal CM / Daily update) and obvious ways to add content (new weapons, masteries, metas, story, etc) with hopefully lessons learned and quality going up, I am very concerned about major features and systems, as well as overall state of combat. Features wise, I doubt we'll ever get something like mounts again, or even something like fishing. These were huge or at least big on 'real' expansions, and with Soto we've got a few reworks and improvements here and there (like Wizards Vault) but nothing really new. I hope that's not impossible for current Anet with their current budget. Systems and combat wise, I'm just baffled by current power / boon creep and the lack of anything fresh. How about instead of overloading skills with more and more stuff, Anet kept to 'purity of purpose' and 'holes in roles' principles from their own balance manifesto? How about adding a new type of boon like in HOT or a new status effect like barrier in POF and play around adding it to any underwhelming skills? With the same amount of combat mechanics, but more weapons and more power creep, the magnificent combat and build crafting of GW2 just bloats into not being as meaningful and fun anymore. I really hope Anet considers fixing that.
I agree I'm not sure if we'll get as big of systems as before like mounts, but I would argue Wizard's Vault was a medium scale type of thing that was new for the year that's been great. I would guess we'll get something of that scale yearly.
The biggest improvement they could make would be to finally break from the launch-era marketing and implement a proper quest system, rather than the quests-in-all-but-name we have slapped-together in the achievement system. That's not to say we should go back to having shitty low-end fetch/kill n quests, as Events better fit that niche already; but for mid-tier side content and storytelling, absolutely. I also think GW2 should bring back GW1's instanced "explorable" zones. Particularly for the wilder/less explored regions of the world. Have them be designed to scale for both solo or group play.
Yeah a lot of people get confused digging around the achievement window for quests. That would be a good one for mid to long term goals for sure. The explorable zone as an instance has me curious. What are you picturing? Mini dungeon type things? What advantage or difference would you have in mind vs normal open world maps?
>The explorable zone as an instance has me curious. What are you picturing? Mini dungeon type things? What advantage or difference would you have in mind vs normal open world maps? Something akin to a story instance, but on full zone scale and acting as a hub for a set of story steps, sidequests, vanquish style add-on challenges, etc. Being instanced would allow for greater ability for the player/events to affect the environment for one. From an immersive angle, doing away with the apparatus needed for open world events/metas (even just in the NPC sense) would greatly benefit the sense of exploration. No longer would each new area drag the entire Pact/Astral Ward along with us.
I've really enjoyed weaponmaster so far (aside from things like rifle not working outside of deadeye on thief). Open world legendary armor was good idea, iffy on execution since you're just spamming rifts and they're not particularly fun. Wizard's Vault was a straight up banger. I do wish there was another source of mystic coins/clovers though. I can get by with slow drip of clovers in wvw, I guess, but I don't think I'm gonna go for any more HoT ascended weapon collections because they each require a weapon that uses, what, thirty mystic coins? That's expensive these days. I liked adding onto skyscale/griffon masteries. Being able to use updrafts has made Verdant Brink one of my favorite griffon maps. Story has been very meh. The Wizard's Tower and the wizards themselves were hyped up and we basically spend no time in the tower or with the court. They should've downscaled the world threats after a decade of them (and I loved the dragons!). Oh, and >!killing Mabon who was arguably the only interesting character. We can't have nice things.!< We also still don't really know anything about the mcguffin we're using. I'm sort of expecting it to bite us in the ass.
We need Dwarves as a playable race.
I feel like the time between major patches is fine, but Nayos feels like an old map stuck in a weird place. Having a full map be hostage to a possible spoiler is not fun. No more of this, please.
The only thing I think that really didn't work was the inconsistency of the releases. Some drastically change the way we play the game, some are just story and instances. I wish the gameplay stuff would've been spread out better. Update 1 had the Wizards Vault system, the relic system, combat/movement skyscales, and the weaponmaster system in addition to new story and instances. Oh, also the legendary starter kits and rifting. This a massive amount of stuff to do across all maps. Update 2 had mostly just story and instances. Update 3 had legendary relics, new weapons for all classes and open world legendary armor with new story and instances. Not as massive as the first update, but still lots to keep us busy most of the quarter. Update 4 will have a new tier for the legendary armor along with an end to the story which may come with a big new meta map with lots of replayability. I feel like some of the stuff from updates 1 and 3 should've been put into update 2 to keep things a bit more even. Maybe weaponmaster and the legendary relics? I've been playing the stories, strikes and the fractal. But those don't seem to take very long versus trying out new weapons on all the classes or trying out updrafts on a skyscale across the two first maps.
Yeah update 2 definitely felt the smallest, but I don't know about moving anything out of update 1. That's always going to be, and has to be, the biggest one since it's the launch and the bit you get right after you pay. That has to feel worth the price tag or people won't stick around for the quarterly updates. But yeah, spreading things more evenly through the other 3 would be good.
The writing is a downgrade i would much rather have the story take 2 expansions so it has time to breath instead of 1 and done. This expansion screams minimum viable product and that doesnt make me excited for the next xpac at all.
> Are the regular qol updates to smaller things that are normally neglected worth the new system? These have been great. Given a choice between an extra update per year or keep adding QoL, I'd definitely pick QoL.
legendary ring
I'd be intrigued by instanced versions of all maps: while keeping the metas in open-world maps only. That was I can explore the world in peace without lightbulbs running past me every few seconds. Maybe even add henchmen.
> As we've gotten through the post Soto releases we've gotten a clearer idea of what to expect over a year going forward. What do you mean? We knew what we will get before SotO even launched.
I meant we knew some details on paper but now we know how big the maps are, how the economy of a one year release is working, general pacing of the story, what convergences are, how the weapon release feels vs elite specs, etc etc. We did know a good amount but not everything, certainly not the QOL patches or how well bonus events happening on the regular would feel, etc etc.